Edith Torony: November 2015

What you will see here is a perpetual search in the way I choose to think differently and to create myself as a visual seeker.

Simplicity is valuable to me. Ideas come from everywhere, but they grow best in solitude.

I like to reconstruct the world, to isolate things from their context, parts and elements from my compositions, reducing everything to what is essential, so that the subject will look as if it had been there for a long time, very natural, just expecting to be seen like that.

Awareness is important, also the way you think and observe the world. I like contradictions and I think freedom is not something we can achieve, it is what we choose to have from the start in creating unconventional distinctive works.

Edith Torony

Edith Torony, Hybrid Playground Estopia Art Gallery June 25th – July 19th, 2019

At the crossroads between abstract and figurative, the show, which features a selection of the last three series of works made between 2017 and 2019, undertakes a journey in the bizarre universe of urban periphery, in the attempt to allegorically recompose the devastating effects of junk invasion and consumerism on our living space.

Edith Torony’s works allude to any peripheric urban area of our globalized world: what mostly strikes in these almost surrealist compositions, with insertions of pop art, is their strange and familiar air. While looking at them, you cannot but recognize objects, fragments or just allusions to everything that in our urban space is identified as surplus, useless or superfluous. That is, the reminiscences of consumerism, of which we don’t know how to get rid of as soon as possible, and which, most of the times, end by being exiled at the margins of our world, extra muros.

From 2012 on, Edith Torony has been observing, as a kind of urban behaviour investigator, the destiny of these objects out of use, exiled and forgotten at the periphery, but her survey does not stop there. What would it be like if all these reminiscences of our daily waste would recompose by themselves a world of their own? What would they say about us if they would be recovered in a recycle bin of memory? Edith Torony’s works recompose exactly this world, in a sort of archaeology of urban periphery: a bizarre and irresistible beauty sparkles from these chaotic landscapes, peopled as they are with objects that attract the eye, similarly as the glowing wrappers with which we pack the goods of our world, dreams included. In this new context, these pieces of reality, once meaningful, seem meaningless today, engaged as they are in a kind of magic dance, floating in their mesmerising singularity, caught in a limbo of desires: unexpectedly, the artist’s game slips in a new zone, where every fragment tells its own story, in an ode to contemporary chaos and the unconscious, speaking on different voices. Fascinating and slightly terrifying, at the same time.

Curator: Irina Ungureanu

Personal Mythologies

My works are earthly, starting with Junkyard Symphony, an approach related to the exterior, ground and waste. The space is increasingly populated by ordinary or current objects, but also by characters. trying to maintain a playful character through representation and recomposition. It passes into another register, the interior, the desires, the lust. but keeping the same horizontal plane.This was the beginning of this personal mythologies, with sincerity, boredom, suffering, desires, or guilty pleasures. Starting with Toxic Desire, I'm more interested in distinguishing my subjectivity and individual development. All the works took shape after personal experiences. From the representations of the bad choices we make through our superficiality and a hedonistic living, to the assumption of this flat existence. We are captive in a sort of limbo of desires. And on this realm I build my works, as a sequential reinterpretation of Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights.

Junkyard Symphony

In the "Junkyard Symphony" series I keep studying the same space from the periphery of the city where I live, space which I explore since 2012 through various techniques: photography, digital manipulation or painting. Between 2013 and 2014 I studied in this area the animal trough, as an element that is found in almost all the works from the "Vertical Absorption" series. As I ended the series, consistent with the changes that have undergone to this space, after the expansion of the city and the inhabitation area which now is more accessible to humans, there began to appear all kinds of plastic waste, synthetic residues, from bright and colorful packaging, to plastic tubes, unaesthetic power poles and wires, all kinds of objects that caught my eye, everything what was thrown away or not integrated in the view. Although I start from a real, existing place that is very close to me, I transform it through my work according to certain events, to everything that I collect during the days. Therefore the name of "junkyard", a sort of recycle bin of the memory, of the unconscious, sometimes these elements are indescribable, to which I do not find meaning or the origin. A sort of personal archeology as a chaotic landscape, populated with all kinds of rejected objects that we no longer need, abstract representations, sometimes with figurative origins, always at the edge. An apparent beauty of everything that is residue, attractive packaging, but lacking content. A desolate space, invaded by everything we don`t need anymore, which we can't get rid of easily. Beginning with the two works with the title "Party Is Over" in 2015, which represent the debris left by people on the beach after they had a good time, I went ahead with the same subject in the "Periphery of Memory" series, thus symbolically transmitting to a mental dimension and gradually reaching the series "Junkyard Symphony" , an ode to chaos and reconstruction, to recomposition, reducing everything to a recycled playground so typical for a second-hand world of our time, from which we can not recant.

Vertical Absorption

The “Vertical Absorption” series is more spiritual in character due to the propensity for ascension, for verticality. I have tried to render the metaphysical side – the isolation in empty spaces – of the manifestations of the psychic or the unpredictable in reality. Stripes and fragments rise to higher planes.

It is all about a correspondence between the telluric and the celestial, the physical and psychical decomposition that is dissolved, absorbed into the infinite. I have always wondered what happens to all the information and memories we store or inherit with the collective unconscious after our physic existence ceases. Gustav Jung says that “any comprehension and all that is comprehended is in itself of psychic nature and in this regard we are captive in an exclusively psychic world”. The trough is, in my work, a kind of reservoir resembling the subconscious, from where deeply rooted fragments, traditions and abstractions spring and are immediately absorbed into vertical ascension.

At the same time, I see some of my compositions as hierophanies, manifestations of the sacred, the unpredictable or the absurd, as I prefer to call it. Mircea Eliade says that space is not homogeneous; therefore, such manifestations occur where there are ruptures that allow the unpredictable to arise. These manifestations are the pretexts for images, for the effect of spontaneity that I seek in my works, for the elements that appear all of a sudden, violently and dynamically. What has always interested me in an image is the effect of space, of full-empty areas, the focus on certain parts and bringing them to the foreground.

Techniques like dripping, imprints or brush strokes, the spatula and other tools help me preserve the freshness of my paintings, to find a balance between the full, loaded areas and the empty, inert ones. I have given the trough, this common, rudimentary object, a new meaning, not only that of a reservoir, a source of water, but also the whole psychical background with exterior manifestations. I find myself in a capitalist world held captive by technology, eager to return to an older source, to a farther, abstract corner belonging to an archaic cultural background, in search for the verticality that has become so necessary in our times.

Periphery Of Memory